Too many people with an enduring passion for art and thought fit poorly or not at all within the current system, isolating them from the peers and mentors they need to flourish. This is why the Avalon Institute was created.

We'll be doing our first Q&A shortly, looking forward to seeing many of you there.

If you'd like to see more events like this in San Francisco, please consider donating! .

September 17th is the anniversary of the death of Hildegard Von Bingen. We would like to organize a celebration of her life, and are searching for scholars and singers who can make it one worthy of her. We will need assistance to do this well, so reach out if you'd like to help!

Please join the Avalon Institute for our inaugural public event! There will be poetry, music, philosophy, drinking, dialogues, and a panel on education in post-academic America. Looking forward to seeing you there.

San Francisco can be a world-leading center of scholarship, culture, and art. There is a confluence of wealth, hope, and ambition here which could create cultural institutions to rival any other in history, but only if we can unite them with the dedication to see it through.

We will overcome the isolation that impoverishes expression and thought. We are building the capacity to find fit between ideas, art, patronage and audience, and will eventually expand beyond SF and acquire a small campus.

We are raising money to hire 2-3 full time staff members, create grants to support cultural and intellectual talent coming to SF, and to improve the quality and quantity of our events, seminars, and conferences.

So far this has been a largely personal enterprise with a shoestring budget. We are professionalizing, supporting a higher frequency of events and providing the institutional support we need to attract and develop cultural talent in San Francisco.

As we create events we work with individuals to identify their bottlenecks and overcome them, refining the purpose and direction of our work. Over the last year we have hosted salons, seminars, presentations, performances, reading groups, experiments, and many visiting scholars.

The Avalon Institute exists to channel the energy and effort needed for cultural excellence. We treat the event as our atomic unit of production - creating spaces where people find peers, mentors, and inspiration.

Starting from our home in SF, we are creating new environments, resources, and developmental tracks for those who are still searching for their place in the wider world. We are the post-academic institution that will draw their work into the world.